by Bear Grylls
Some of the crowd rushed forward now, but Scalp brandished his pistol in their faces.
The wounded boy had both his hands up, begging for his life. Jaeger could hear his pitiful pleas for mercy, but Scalp seemed lost in a crazed bloodlust, drunk with the power of the gun. He opened fire again, shooting the boy in the body. Then he bent forward and placed the muzzle of his pistol against his head.
‘He’s dead,’ Simon Bello announced, through gritted teeth. ‘Any second now, he’s dead.’
For an instant the ghetto seemed to hold its breath, and then a shot rang out through the press of bodies, echoing around the fury-filled alleyways.
The crowd lost all control now. Figures surged forward, howling with fury. Scalp raised his weapon and began firing in the air, driving them back. At the same time, he yelled into his radio for backup.
Police reinforcements pounded down the alleyway towards the confrontation. Jaeger could sense that the ghetto was about to explode. The last thing they needed right now was to get caught up in all that. Sometimes, as he’d learned, discretion was the better part of valour.
They needed to save Simon Bello. That was the priority.
He grabbed the kid and, yelling at the others to follow, took to his heels.
68
The big, powerful Audi barrelled along the Autobahn at breakneck speed. Raff had met them at the airport, and he was clearly in a hurry. In fact, they all were, and as Raff was as fine a driver as any, Jaeger wasn’t particularly worried.
‘So you found the kid?’ Raff asked, without taking his eyes from the dark road.
‘We did.’
‘Is he for real?’
‘The story he told us – no one could have made it up, and certainly not an orphaned kid from the slums.’
‘So what did you learn? What did he say?’
‘What Konig told us is pretty much the full story. The kid added a few minor details. Nothing significant. So, are we any closer to finding that island? Kammler’s island?
Raff smiled. ‘Yeah, we might be.’
‘Like how?’ Jaeger pushed.
‘Wait for the briefing. As soon as we get to Falkenhagen. Wait for that. So where is the kid now? Is he safe?’
‘Dale’s got him in his hotel. Adjoining rooms. The Serena. Remember it?’
Raff nodded. He and Jaeger had stayed there once or twice, when rotating through Nairobi with the British military. For a hotel in the centre of the city, it was a rare island of peace and tranquillity.
‘They can’t stay there,’ Raff remarked, stating the obvious. ‘They’ll get noticed.’
‘Yeah, so we figured. Dale’s taking him to a remote retreat. Amani Beach, several hours south of Nairobi. That’s the best we could come up with for now.’
Twenty minutes later, they pulled into the dark and deserted grounds of the Falkenhagen bunker. Oddly, considering the gruesome testing that Jaeger had been subjected to here, it felt somehow good to be back.
He woke Narov. She’d dozed through the journey curled up on the Audi’s rear seat. They’d hardly slept at all in the last twenty-four hours. Having extricated themselves and the kid from the knife-edge chaos of the slums, they’d been on a whirlwind journey ever since.
Raff checked his watch. ‘Briefing is at 0100 hours. You got twenty minutes. Show you to your rooms.’
Once in his bedroom Jaeger splashed some water on his face. No time for a shower. He’d left his few personal effects in Falkenhagen: his passport, phone and wallet. Since he’d travelled to Katavi under a pseudonym, he’d had to make sure he was one hundred per cent sterile in terms of being Will Jaeger.
But Peter Miles had furnished the room with a MacBook Air laptop, and he was keen to check email. Via ProtonMail – an ultra-secure email service – he knew he could check his messages with little risk of Kammler and his people being able to monitor it.
Before discovering ProtonMail, all their previous communication systems had been hacked. They’d used a draft email account from which messages were never actually sent; all you ever did was log on to the account using a shared password, and read the drafts.
With no messages being sent, it should have been secure.
It wasn’t.
Kammler’s people had hacked it. They’d used that account to torture Jaeger – first with photos of Leticia Santos in captivity; then with photos of his family.
Jaeger paused. He couldn’t resist the urge – the dark temptation – to check it now. He hoped that Kammler’s people would somehow mess up; that they’d email something – some image – from which he could extract a clue as to their whereabouts. Something via which to track them – and his family.
There was one message sitting in the draft folder. As always, it was blank. It simply had a link to a file in Dropbox – an online data storage system. No doubt it would be part of Kammler’s ongoing mind warfare.
Jaeger breathed deeply. A darkness descended upon him like a black cloud.
With shaking hands he clicked on the link, and an image began to download. Line by line it filled the screen.
The image showed a dark-haired, emaciated woman kneeling beside the figure of a boy, both dressed in nothing but their underclothes. She had one arm thrown around the child protectively.
The boy was Jaeger’s son, Luke. His shoulders were thin and hunched, as if he had the weight of the world piled upon them, and in spite of his mother’s protective stance. He was holding a strip of torn bedsheet before him, like a banner.
On it was written: DADDY – HELP US.
The image faded out. A blank white screen replaced it, with a message typed in black across it:
Come find your family.
Wir sind die Zukunft.
Wir sind die Zukunft: we are the future. It was Hank Kammler’s calling card.
Jaeger clenched his hands into fists to try to stop them shaking, then slammed them repeatedly into the wall.
He doubted if he could go on. He couldn’t do this any more.
Every man had his breaking point.
69
At Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta Airport, a Boeing 747 cargo aircraft was in the process of being loaded. A forklift raised crate after crate marked with the KRP logo and slotted them into the hold.
When fully loaded, this flight would be routed to the east coast of the USA, to Washington’s Dulles airport. America imported some 17,000 primates every year, for the purposes of medical testing. Over the years, KRP had grabbed a good chunk of that market.
Another KRP flight was scheduled to fly to Beijing, a third to Sydney, a fourth to Rio de Janeiro . . . Within a matter of forty-eight hours, all those flights should have landed and the evil would be complete.
And in that, Hank Kammler had just received an unexpected boost, although he wasn’t to know it.
After the British, Kammler hated the Russians almost as much. It was on the Eastern Front, mired in snowy wastes, that Hitler’s mighty Wehrmacht – his war machine – had finally ground to a halt. The Russian Red Army had played a pivotal role in its subsequent defeat.
Accordingly, Moscow was Kammler’s second key target, after London. A 747 cargo aircraft had recently touched down at the city’s Vnukovo airport. Even now, Sergei Kalenko, Vnukovo’s quarantine officer, was busy overseeing the transfer of the caged primates to the nearby pens.
But this was Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where everything was somewhat negotiable. Kalenko had directed that a few dozen cages – containing thirty-six vervet monkeys – should be stacked to one side.
Centrium – Russia’s largest pharmaceutical testing company – had run out of animals for an ongoing drugs trial. Each day’s delay was costing the company some $50,000. Money – bribes – talked in Russia, and accordingly Kalenko wasn’t about to object to a few dozen of his charges evading quarantine. He figured the risk was negligible. After all, KRP had never once sent an unhealthy shipment, and he didn’t expect them to have done so now.
Quickly the cages were loade
d on to the rear of a flatbed truck and sheeted over with a dull green canvas. That done, Kalenko pocketed a large wad of cash and the vehicle sped away into the frost-kissed Moscow night.
He watched the truck’s red tail lights disappear before reaching into the voluminous pocket of his overcoat. Like many airport workers, Kalenko took the occasional nip of vodka to ward off the mind-numbing cold. He treated himself to an extra large gulp now, to celebrate his lucky windfall.
The heater in the Centrium truck cab was on the blink. All day, the man at the wheel had been likewise fighting off the icy chill, and mostly via the bottle. As he headed towards Centrium’s vast facility, he swung the vehicle into the first of a series of bleak suburbs that lay on the south-eastern fringes of the city.
The truck hit a patch of black ice. The driver’s reactions – numbed by the alcohol – were a fraction too slow. It took only an instant, but suddenly the vehicle had skidded off the highway and tumbled down a snowy bank, the canvas ripping open and throwing its load across the ground.
Primates screamed and cackled in fear and rage. The door of the cab had been thrown open at a crazed angle by the impact. The bloodied and dazed form of the driver stumbled out, collapsing in the snow.
The door to the first of the cages was pushed ajar by a terrified hand. Small but powerful fingers tested the strange coat of glistening cold – this alien whiteness. The confused animal sensed freedom – or a freedom of sorts – but could it really walk on this frozen surface?
Up above, vehicles drew to a halt. Faces peered over the incline. Seeing what had happened, some decided to film it on their mobile phones, but one or two actually made the effort to help. As they skidded down the icy bank, the monkeys heard them coming.
It was now or never.
The first broke free from its cage, scattering a cloud of powdery snow in its wake as it made a dash for the nearest shadows. Other cages had likewise burst open, and those animals followed the first monkey’s lead.
By the time the dazed driver had managed to do a body count, he was twelve primates down. A dozen vervet monkeys had escaped into the snowbound streets of this Moscow suburb – cold, hungry and frightened. There was no way the driver could raise the alarm. He’d broken strict quarantine laws. He, Kalenko and Centrium would be in the shit if the cops were alerted.
The monkeys would have to fend for themselves.
The truck happened to have deposited the primates on a road running along the Moskva river. Forming themselves into a makeshift troop, they gathered on the riverbank, huddling together for warmth.
An old woman was hurrying along the riverside. She spied the monkeys and, fearing she was seeing things, started to run. As she skidded on the icy surface and tumbled, the fresh bread stuffed in her shopping bag was strewn across the path. The famished monkeys were upon it in a flash. The woman – dazed and confused – tried to beat them off with her gloved hands.
A vervet snarled. The woman didn’t heed the warning. It struck with its canines, ripping through her gloves and raking a bloodied track across the upper surface of her hand. The woman screamed, monkey saliva mixed with the thick red blood dripping from her wound.
At a cry from the troop’s self-proclaimed leader, the vervets grabbed what bread they could and set off into the busy night – running, climbing and hunting for more food.
A few hundred yards along the river, an after-school club was coming to an end. Moscow kids were learning Sambo, a Soviet-era martial art originally perfected by the KGB but now increasingly popular with the mainstream.
The monkeys were drawn to the noise and the warmth. After a moment’s hesitation, the leader took the troop through an open window. A blow heater propelled currents of hot air into the hall, where the youths were busy with their final bouts of the evening.
One of the monkeys sneezed. Tiny droplets were propelled into the atmosphere, and were wafted with the heat into the hall. Sweaty, panting fighters breathed hard, gasping for air.
Across a city of some eleven million unsuspecting souls, the evil was spreading.
70
Peter Miles stood up to speak. Bearing in mind the intense pressure they were all under, he appeared remarkably calm. Right now, Jaeger wasn’t feeling that way at all. The challenge was to drive from his mind that terrible image of his wife and child – DADDY – HELP US – so that he could focus on what was coming.
At least this time he had gleaned something potentially useful from the image; something that might help him track down his family and their captors.
‘Welcome, everyone,’ Miles began. ‘And especially a returning William Jaeger and Irina Narov. There are several new faces in the room. Rest assured, all are trusted members of our network. I will introduce them as we go, and feel free to fire in any questions.’
He spent a few minutes summarising Jaeger and Narov’s discoveries, both at the Katavi Reserve and in the Nairobi slums, before reaching the crux of the matter.
‘Falk Konig revealed that his father, Hank Kammler, runs a highly secretive primate export business – Katavi Reserve Primates – from an island off the coast of East Africa. The primates are air-freighted around the world for medical research purposes. The level of secrecy surrounding this island operation is unprecedented.
‘So, how likely is it that this monkey export facility doubles as Kammler’s bio-warfare lab? Highly likely, as it happens. During the war, Kurt Blome – the godfather of the Gottvirus – set up his germ warfare testing facility off Germany’s Baltic coast, on the island of Riems. Reason being, you can test a pathogen on an island with a reasonable likelihood that it won’t escape. In short, an island is the perfect isolated incubator.’
‘But we still don’t know what Kammler intends to do with the virus,’ a voice cut in. It was Hiro Kamishi, as ever the voice of measured reason.
‘We don’t,’ Miles confirmed. ‘But with the Gottvirus in Kammler’s hands, we have the architect of a conspiracy to bring back Hitler’s Reich possessing the world’s most fearful weapon. That alone is an utterly terrifying scenario, regardless of what exact use he intends to make of it.’
‘Do we have any better idea what the Gottvirus is?’ a voice cut in. It was Joe James. ‘Where it came from? How to stop it?’
Miles shook his head. ‘Unfortunately not. From all our research, there is no record anywhere of it ever having existed. Officially, the two SS officers who discovered it – Lieutenants Herman Wirth and Otto Rahn – are both recorded as deceased due to “death by misadventure”. According to official records, the pair went hiking in the German Alps, got lost and froze to death in the snow. Yet by Blome’s own account, those two men were the discoverers of the Gottvirus, and finding it killed them. In short, the Nazis had the Gottvirus purged from all official records.’
‘So, the million-dollar question,’ Jaeger ventured. ‘Where is Kammler’s island? I understand we may have a fix on it?’
‘You don’t need a great deal of land for this kind of work,’ Miles replied, by way of an answer. ‘Working on the basis of a landmass the size of Riems, there are approximately a thousand possible candidates off the coast of East Africa – which did make finding it something of a challenge. That is, until . . .’
He cast around his audience until his gaze came to rest upon one distinctive individual. ‘At this stage I’ll hand over to Jules Holland. He is his own best introduction.’
A dishevelled figure shuffled forwards. Overweight, scruffily dressed and with his greying hair tied back in a straggly ponytail, he looked somewhat out of place in the former nuclear command bunker of the Soviet Union.
He turned to face the audience and smiled his snaggle-toothed smile. ‘Jules Holland, but to all who know me well, the Ratcatcher. The Rat for short. Computer hacker, working for the good guys. Mostly. Quite an effective one too, if I might say so. And usually rather expensive.
‘It’s via Will Jaeger’s good offices that I’m here.’ He gave a slight bow. ‘And I must say, I’m very
glad to be of service.’
The Rat glanced at Peter Miles. ‘This gentleman gave me the gen. Not a lot to go on: find me an island of anything more than postage-stamp size where this Nazi lunatic may have sited his germ warfare laboratory.’ He paused. ‘I’ve had easier briefs. Took a bit of lateral thinking. Whether or not it’s a germ warfare lab, the one thing we do know is that it’s a monkey export facility. And that is what cracked it. The monkeys were the key.’
Holland brushed back his lank hair, wisps of which were falling free. ‘The monkeys are captured in and around the Katavi Reserve, and flown from there to the island. Now, every flight leaves a trace. Numerous flights leave numerous traces. So I . . . erm . . . paid an unauthorised visit to the Tanzanian Air Traffic Control computer. It proved most accommodating.
‘I found three dozen KRP flights of interest over the past few years, all to the same location.’ He paused. ‘Around one hundred miles off the coast of Tanzania lies Mafia Island. Yes, “Mafia” as in the Sicilian bad guys. Mafia Island is a popular high-end tourist resort. It is part of an island chain; an archipelago. On the far southern end of that chain lies tiny, isolated Little Mafia Island.
‘Until two decades or so, Little Mafia was uninhabited. The only visitors were the local fishermen, who stopped there to repair their wooden boats. It is heavily forested – jungle, obviously – but it has no natural water source, so no one could afford to stay for long.
‘Twenty years ago, it was purchased by a private foreign buyer. Pretty shortly, even the fishermen stopped visiting. Those who had occupied the island weren’t exactly friendly. More to the point, a population of monkeys moved in alongside the humans, and they proved less than welcoming. Many were horribly, terribly diseased. Glazed eyes. Walking-dead killer zombie look. Plus lots and lots of bleeding.’
Holland eyed his audience darkly. ‘The locals coined a new name for the place, one that I fear is aptly suited. They call it Plague Island.’